Evelyn’s Oct. 22 posting on false messiahs, Jewish faith and culture reminded me that we have had past forays into Biblical literature. The most notable example is the publication of the Book of Jubilees translated from Ethiopic texts and fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The translation by James VanderKam appeared in Volume 15 (1992), number 1, as a “Found Text” feature — a series that typically includes renowned authors’ unpublished works.
What was so incredible about our publishing this work was that until the early ’90s, much of the Dead Sea Scrolls had not been released for public viewing or, for that matter, widespread scholarly examination — more than forty years after the discovery of the first scrolls by a Bedouin shepherd in the Judean desert east of Palestine. The scrolls date from about 250 B.C. to 68 A.D. and include manuscripts or fragments of every book of the Jewish Bible (or Old Testament) except Esther, as well as non-biblical texts.
The publication of the Book of Jubilees was just one step in the process of the Dead Sea Scrolls release to the public. Today they are available to everyone. And in spite of grumblings and “conspiracy theory” speculations, there were no texts that would rock the Judeo-Christian traditions. If anything, according to George Nickelsburg, professor emeritus of religion at the University of Iowa, quoted in the Sep. 20 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “The scrolls attest to ‘the general reliability of the Hebrew text on which most modern translations have been made….’”
A traveling exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls includes stops in Seattle, Kansas City, San Diego, Phoenix, and Raleigh.
1 response so far ↓
1
Charles
// Jan 9, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Regarding the Scrolls exhibit planned for San Diego:
For years, the American Association of Museums, in a document entitled “Standards and Best Practices for Museums”, has recommended a policy of neutrality for topics that are the object of scientific controversy.
While the San Diego Natural History Museum exhibit has not yet opened, it appears that the Museum may be planning to violate the AAM standard by presenting a biased and distorted account of the present state of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.
Many important news accounts over the past decade (including, most notably, several by John Noble Wilford in the New York Times) have described a polarization of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars into two salient schools: one holding that Qumran was the homoe of an Essenic sect which, according to this view, wrote the Scrolls; the other holding that the place was a secular Jewish site whose inhabitants assisted in hiding the Scrolls, but had nothing to do with their content; the scrolls, according to this second view, are the remains of the libraries of the Jews of Jerusalem, gathered up and hidden in the desert shortly before the destruction of that great city by the Romans.
Reflecting this polarization, the Cambridge History of Judaism features two articles on the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls: one defending the so-called Qumran-Essene theory, the other defending the Jerusalem-libraries theory.
If, however, what we read is true, the Natural History Museum, in what would be a manifest departure from its mission to educate the public, intends to depict only the Qumran-Essene theory of Scroll origins, while excluding all of the evidence that has led an increasing number of scholars to reject that theory over the past decade.
Clearly, the Museum’s duty is to present both of the theories, along with the evidence that supports them, so that the public can be properly informed and judge for itself.
This entire issue is dealt with at length at http://pacific-science-scrolls-scandal.blogspot.com/
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